The average MMORPG is often equated to a huge treadmill, but that’s only half the story. A treadmill tends to remain at the same inclination as you run. Imagine a treadmill that makes you run harder and faster every time you mark an arbitrary performance metric until you eventually fall off and festoon it on all sides with colorful cardboard cutouts of elves and dwarves and you’ve got a better idea of the frustrations of the MMORPG grind.

It’s an aspect of the genre that even most MMORPG lovers hate. Every time you ding a new level, you know that it will take even longer and require even more tedium to reach the next one.

If you hate grinding, Isaiah Cartwright, the designer for the forthcoming MMO Guild Wars 2, has a promise for you: buy his game, and you won’t have to deal with the ridiculous leveling curves of other titles.

In fact, compared to the average leveling curve in other games, Guild Wars 2 is just a straight line. That means that it will take just as long in Guild Wars 2 to go from level one to level two as it will to go from level nineteen to level twenty.

“We expect content—not long, grindy progression—to be the deciding factor that keeps people playing our game. We want everyone to stick with Guild Wars 2 because our content is fun and enjoyable, not out of some dogged determination to slowly, slowly advance,” says Cartwright. If only Blizzard et al. would follow suit.